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Quothling | on: Trump wins presidency for second time
It'll be interesting to see what this will mean for European dependence on US tech companies. I'm not personally against companies like Microsoft as such, in fact I think they are one of the better IT business partners for non-tech Enterprise. Often what they sell is vastly underestimated by their critics within the EU, not that I disagree with the problematic nature of depending on foreign tech companies either. With the proposed deregulation of US tech and their "freeing", however, I wonder if a lot of organisations will be capable of continuing using US tech services or it'll move in the direction of how Chinese (and other) services aren't legally available for a lot of things.
physicsguy | parent | next
I work for a European company and we already have strict rules about what data we’re allowed to remit into the US. Typically we’re only allowed to use cloud products hosted within UK + EU. It’s actually causing problems for us now with some of the generative AI stuff since the Azure offering doesn’t match fully the APIs of OpenAI for e.g.
Quothling | root | parent | next
It's similar for us. Since I work in the energy industry we're required to have plans for how to exit Microsoft if the EU deems it too dangerous for too much of the energy industry to be reliant on Microsoft. Which is part of why I worry, because we honestly can't. We can leave Azure, but we can't easily leave the 365 platform. By easily I mean that we may not survive as a company if we have to do it. It can obviously be done, we just don't have the resources required to do it.
GTP | root | parent
I'm genuinely curious to hear why it would be so hard to leave the Office 365 platform, to the point that it could mean have to shut down the company. I know it isn't something that can be done overnight, but this is on a whole different level than what I assumed the case to be. To make my question more concrete, let's say the EU gives you two years to move away from Office 365, why would this jeopardize your company?
margorczynski | root | parent | next
Most corpos and banks are basically built on Excel, Outlook, Teams, Sharepoint, etc.

If you pluck that out it completely freezes 50%+ of their operations, people really don't get how much stuff in modern companies is reliant on MS stuff (and thus why they are one of the richest companies on the globe)

GTP | root | parent
Yes, but there are comparable alternatives. Sure, the transition requires resources and effort, but to the point of making a company bankrupt?
margorczynski | root | parent
In some cases I would say yes if there was a hard limit (even few years) to migrate. Again, most people that didn't work in many really big corpos and banks don't comprehend how reliant those businesses are on the MS office stack.
Quothling | root | parent | next
> Office 365 platform

Moving away from that would be a massive change management undertaking, but it's not the "Office" part which is our primary challenge. To be fair, I'm not sure we could actually survive the change management required to leave the Office and Windows part, as it would be completely unfamiliar territory for like 95% of our employees, but the collective we at least think that we can. We have quite a lot of Business Central 365 instances, the realistic alternative to those would be Excel (but not Excel). SharePoint is also a semi-massive part of our business as it's basically our "Document Warehouse".

I guess maybe I'm using the 365 term wrong?

GTP | root | parent
I didn't know about business central, a quick Google search tells me it's an ERP. There are alternatives, but migrating an ERP is definitely more problematic than changing document storage and the applications you use to read and write documents. But if it's an ERP, I wouldn't say an electronic sheet like Excel would be an alternative. Or am I missing something?
junto | root | parent
At enterprise scale migrating to SAP is a 2-3 year project. Most of which is planning, discovery, business analysis and process modeling.
the5avage | root | parent | next
One very mundane reason a company I had worked for switched to Office365, was that emails from our own domain would often end up in the spam filter. It can cost a lot when that happens.
GTP | root | parent
I see this being a problem in the current situation, where most businesses use either Google or Microsoft for their emails. But in the case of an EU-wide change, I think the situation would be different. Plus, there are other providers that could be used that aren't blocked by MS' and Google's spam filters.
octacat | root | parent
yeah, the real selling point of the google mail is that they have the power to just remove mail from other providers. Or the risk of removing is enough motivation of using gmail only. And as a major mail provider, they could change the ways we handle mail (to make it more reliable), they just choose not to.
the5avage | root | parent
It is really f up but there are so many worse things that I just dont have the energy to feel angry about this one.
casey2 | root | parent
They just mean that they would have to do real work and not just sit on their ass goofing off on the internet all day. Real work is something the last few generations are "allergic" to, it gives them the "ick". They somehow got it into their head that doing work is bad and that you should only rely on other peoples work, I blame Gates and public education.
GTP | root | parent
I don't agree with this view. Saying that new generations are lazy compared to the previous ones is a complain as old as humanity itself, there are ancient writers that made the same complains centuries ago. Either you know their situation and you can provide some more detailed argument, or you are just assuming things you don't know.
onli | root | parent | next
Which is a nonsensical policy of course, since the US made clear in the past that regardless of where the server is located, US companies have to give access to data. See the CLOUD act.
amai | root | parent
My experience is that most companies in Europe just don‘t care about data privacy and continue to use whatever Microsoft sells them. Vendor-Lockin is a huge issue.
RickarySanchez | parent | next
European wise I think we're really failing to build significant homegrown tech companies. I'm not sure of the exact reason although I've heard that startup support it low and too much regulation / diversity of regulation are issues.
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Molitor5901 | parent | next
I'm more curious about the NYT tech union strike. They went forward with the strike and.. it doesn't appear anything bad happened. That might completely undermine the union's arguments...
mrtksn | parent | next
Europe is still very much pro-American: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/06/27/overall-opinio...

However, the numbers are much worse than before and on the previous Trump presidency they crashed(recovered with Biden but crashed again): https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/06/11/appendix-a-fav...

The anti-establishment movements in EU are also predominantly anti-US, leftists are often anti-US too.

I got the impression of many Americans online believing that Europeans are tech and progress loving, bureaucracy hating people under tyranny of EU which is a building in Brussels that churns rules and regulations.

However that's not true, most Europeans love the big government hate new tech and prefer the slow and worry free life over the daily hustling.

If Trump follows up with its promises, I only imagine EU parting with US on more stuff. I also see many Americans apparently believing that EU is mostly museums and there's no technology. Also not true, EU is made of countries that are traditionally tool-makers and Europeans are anti-tech and anti-change only when it comes to adoption of tech into their daily lives, not when creating tools and machines. ASML is not a coincidence, all kind of precision tooling and machinery is the bread and butter of European industry.

So, if EU parts with US, I imagine that American stuff will be quickly replaced with European made stuff. The dominance of American tech in the daily lives is mostly due to network effect, a forced change will result in what resulted in Russia and China: local alternatives.

Europe is worse off than the US only in Energy and demographics. Two massive issues but there are no quick-fixes for those, so they are European realities with or without the US.

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TrackerFF | parent | next
If Trump goes through with his wide-sweeping tariffs, there will be trade wars. That goes for tech, too.

And keep in mind, if he installs nothing but loyalists and sycophants, who's to stop him from these half-baked ideas?

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elminjo | parent | next
The first time Trump was elected was a shock, but now we understand. It wasn't a simple mistake. I have only few customers who use Google Workspace for their emails and only one who uses Dropbox for files. Initially (about 2002) companies moved away from U.S.-based cloud services. However, now I have an increasing number of customers who want to cancel cloud services entirely. But for my customers, there is no alternative to Windows.
DeathArrow | parent
The EU beaurocracy is into self sabotage.

They don't promote a climate where European tech companies can grow and they hamper the usage of US tech companies products.

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